Obligation-Conflict Resolution
Case 21-7 (2021) · Public Safety, Health, and Welfare: Avoiding Rolling Blackouts
Professional obligations conflict, and the board applies no fixed rule for which one wins.
Each resolution is recorded as three edges:
competesWith (the tension),
prevailsOver (the obligation the board allowed to win in this case), and
defeasibleUnder (the situation under which the yielding obligation gives way).
The same tension is then traced across comparable cases, where its resolution shifts with context.
Hover any obligation or state to see its definition; click to open it in OntServe.
How this case resolved it
No obligation was overridden in this case: the board resolved the apparent tension without defeat, as recorded below.
Resolved without defeat
The board resolved the apparent tension here by setting a duty's boundary (specification) or by finding no genuine conflict on the facts (dissolution), rather than by allowing one obligation to prevail over another.
specification
Given that Engineer A's utility consultation surfaced resource planners' concerns about rolling outages, and given that a report confined to solar-project viability or stakeholder carbon goals would have obscured that risk, the board concluded that disclosure obligations necessarily expanded beyond the assignment's original scope, not because public...
What the board concluded
- Engineer A has an ethical obligation to include information about the utility generation mix and potential rolling blackouts in a report to the organization’s board.
- Engineer A’s report should also include information about cost of battery storage and the potential consequences of not having battery storage on system reliability relative to public safety, health, and welfare.